Stochastic learning models provide sharp predictions about equilibrium selection when the noise level of the learning process is taken to zero.  The difficulty is that, when the noise is extremely small, it can take an extremely long time for a large population to reach the stochastically...

The diffusion of an innovation can be represented by a process in which agents choose perturbed best responses to what their neighbors are currently doing.  Diffusion is said to be fast if the expected waiting time until the innovation spreads widely is bounded above independently of the size...

A rational player will never play a strictly dominated strategy. It might be tempting therefore to eliminate such strategies from any subsequent analysis. However, if equilibrium selection is an issue it may be wrong to do so. In models of adaptive learning with state-independence mutations,...

A strategy revision process in symmetric normal form games is proposed. Following Kandori, Mailath, and Rob (1993), members of a population periodically revise their strategy choice, and choose a myopic best response to currently observed play. Their payoffs are perturbed by normally distributed...

Equilibrium selection in coordination games has generated a large literature. Kandori, Mailath and Rob (1993) and Young (1993) studied dynamic models of aggregate behaviour in which agents choose best responses to observations of population play. Crucially, infrequent mistakes (`mutations`)...

Data from three bargaining games - the Dictator Game, the Ultimatum Game, and the Third-Party Punishment Game - played in 15 societies are presented.  The societies range from US undergraduates to Amazonian, Arctic, and African hunter-gatherers.  Behaviour within the games varies markedly...

In the context of a "beauty contest" coordination game (in which pay-offs depend on the proximity of actions to an unobserved state variable and to the average action) players choose how much costly attention to pay to various informative signals; they endogenously select information sources and...

In a collective-action game a player`s payoff is the sum of (i) a private component that depends only on that player`s action, and (ii) a public component, common to all players and dependent upon all actions. A classic application is the private provision of a public good. Play evolves:...

A public good is produced if and only if a team of m or more volunteers contribute to it. An equilibrium-selection problem leads to the questions: will collective action succeed? If so, who will participate in the team? The paper studies the evolution of collective action: as part of a...

Collective action problems arise in a variety of situations. The economic theory of public good provision raises a number of important questions. Who contributes to the public good, and who free rides? How might a social planner exploit the interdependence of decision-making to encourage...